Big Pharma Rolls Off Production Line, Is Out Now

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Big Pharma [official site] is “part business sim, part logistics puzzle”, where you’re dealing with balancing three competing resources: the limited space you have for the machinery that makes your drugs; the money you make from selling those drugs and spend to buy new machines; and your own conscience as you get reports back on the side effects of your pills. It’s out today.

Do you have enough heart to sacrifice money and space to stop the terrible nightmares your hypertension pills are giving people? Think about it while watching the trailer below.

Watching that trailer should signal whether this is a game for you. I suspect it’s a game for me; I have a soft spot for slow work of making machines efficient, as in other recent indie game Factorio. There is a wonderful satisfaction to making these industrial Rube Goldberg devices operate efficiently, and I suspect a bit of Theme Hospital-style gallows humour wouldn’t hurt either.

Alec got his hands on Big Pharma earlier this year and spoke to developer Tim Wicksteed about the game’s mixture of business management and logic puzzle.

Factorio is my go-to game for when I’ve only got my laptop with me. The screenshots of Big Pharma kind of reminds me of Free Enterprise, an old business sim I used to play a little bit where you would have to lay out machines in a factory to make and sell products. I really like these kinds of hands-on business sim games so maybe I’ll check this out.

It’s good! Building the factory and figuring out how to get various materials across the factory is fun. The layouts of the machines put a restriction on how you lay your factory out, and the factory buildings are unusual shapes, so you have to think ahead to make the most out of your space.

There’s also a pretty large research tree, and for increasing/decreasing concentrations (which is one of the main uses of the machines), most machines are ‘sidegrades’ rather than upgrades (e.g. the Ionizer is 3x as effective as the Dissolver but costs more than 3x to run), which means that if you can lay out your factory carefully you can maximise your profits.

My only complaint about the game so far is that it’s kind of slow paced. After the tutorial, the first mission took me over an hour to complete, and only to the silver medal. It seems that in many cases the better medals just take longer, rather than being substantially more difficult.

There’s also kind of a lack of conveyer types (although I appreciate that this may be a gameplay decision). Only one belt type is available in Big Pharma, while Factorio (for example) has a couple, which let you go underground to route around things and move materials around faster. That said, underground belts would make quite a lot of difference to how Big Pharma plays so again, maybe this is a deliberate decision.

Finally, the ‘message’ of the game is there, although subtly delivered. The game doesn’t really rate how ‘evil’ your pharmaceutical company is, other than rating how good your cures are – better cures with fewer side effects are more expensive to produce but are worth somewhat more. I found myself prioritising quality over profits in a couple of cases where such products would benefit people I know. It’s completely possible to make a valuable cure with horrific side effects but these make your products less popular.

Anyway, good overall, although a bit slow for my liking. One other thing I will say is that there seem to be no autosaves, so be careful to save regularly.

Both this and Factorio look great, I’ve been missing games like this since most of them got infected with “free to not play”, seems like there’s a renaissance of legitimate management games coming, which is great!